Amazon Turned Away a Breastfeeding Mother. Employers Keep Losing This Fight.

8 July 2026 • By Tom Street, Solicitor

The tidy version of this story is that Amazon made an administrative slip, said sorry, and offered a do-over. Everyone moves on. And on the face of it, that is what happened.

I want to be straight about one thing before I go further. Rachael Bews was a guest on a business course, not an Amazon employee, so this particular incident isn’t strictly an employment law case at all. It sits in the consumer and services side of the Equality Act. But the barrier she hit, “we can’t accommodate a breastfeeding mother, so you can’t come in”, is one I see land on employees again and again. And when it lands at work, employers keep losing.

What actually happened

Rachael Bews runs Nu Coton and had been accepted onto Amazon’s Innovation Accelerator, a programme meant to help small businesses grow. She feeds her five-month-old daughter herself, so she did the sensible thing and told the organisers ahead of time. Her plan was modest: her husband would look after the baby on the campus, and she’d feed during breaks.

The problem only surfaced when she was on the train. Amazon rang to explain that under-sixes aren’t allowed on its fulfilment centre sites, a long-standing safety rule. With nowhere for her husband and baby to wait, she couldn’t attend. Amazon has since apologised for the poor communication and offered her a place at a later event.

For completeness on the law that actually applies to her: under section 17 of the Equality Act 2010, treating a woman unfavourably because she is breastfeeding is unlawful when you provide a service to the public, and that protection runs for 26 weeks from the birth. Her daughter is around 20 weeks old, which puts the outcome inside that window. That’s a consumer question, though, and not my field. The reason this story matters to me is what it tells us about the workplace.

At work, the tribunals have already spoken

Swap the accelerator course for a mandatory training day, a client conference, or a shift pattern an employee has to work, and you have a scenario the employment tribunals have ruled on repeatedly. The pattern is consistent, even though each case turns on its own facts.

The landmark is McFarlane and another v easyJet Airline Company Ltd. Two cabin crew came back from maternity leave still breastfeeding and asked, with GP support, to be rostered for no more than eight hours so they could express milk and avoid mastitis. easyJet refused, then offered ground duties for six months only, treating breastfeeding beyond that as a lifestyle choice it needn’t accommodate. In 2016 an employment tribunal held that the long-shift requirement was indirect sex discrimination. The tribunal was scathing that easyJet had ignored four GPs and skipped the risk assessments it should have carried out.

More recently, in Gibbins v Cardiff and Vale University Local Health Board, a healthcare support worker returning from maternity leave asked for a private, lockable room to express milk. Instead she was handed a sign for the door and told to wedge a chair against it. A male colleague walked in on her. A £5.50 lock was eventually fitted, months late. The tribunal found she had suffered harassment related to sex. The failure was almost absurdly small and cheap to fix, and it still cost the employer.

It isn’t a guaranteed win, and I won’t pretend it is. In Mellor v MFG Academies Trust, a teacher left to express milk in toilets or her car succeeded on harassment but not on every claim she ran. Outcomes vary with the facts. What doesn’t vary is the theme: employers who treat a breastfeeding employee’s needs as an optional extra are the ones ending up in front of a judge.

Why breastfeeding is a sex discrimination issue

People still talk about accommodating a breastfeeding employee as though it were a nicety. Legally, it’s nothing of the sort. Once maternity leave ends, the specific pregnancy and maternity protection largely falls away, and breastfeeding at work is handled through sex discrimination law instead. A rule or requirement that disadvantages breastfeeding women, and can’t be properly justified, can amount to indirect sex discrimination, exactly as in easyJet. Denying a private space, or exposing a woman while she expresses, can be harassment related to sex, exactly as in Gibbins.

On top of that, employers have concrete health and safety duties. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 require suitable rest facilities for breastfeeding and pregnant workers, and a toilet does not count. There’s a genuine gap worth naming: the UK still has no standalone statutory right to paid breastfeeding breaks. But “no specific right to a break” is a world away from “we can lawfully shut you out.”

Health and safety is a reason to plan, not a reason to refuse

I want to be fair to the safety point. A fulfilment centre is full of heavy machinery, and keeping small children off the operational floor is entirely legitimate. Nobody sensible is arguing a baby belongs next to the conveyor lines.

But in discrimination law, having a legitimate aim is only half the test. You also have to show that what you did was a proportionate way of achieving it, which means asking whether a less exclusionary option would have worked just as well. A meeting room away from the floor. A quiet space for a partner and baby to wait. Running the session somewhere other than a live warehouse. That is precisely the reasoning that sank easyJet: the tribunal rejected the claim that bespoke arrangements were impossible, given how few people were affected. Safety explains why a baby can’t be on the packing floor. It does not explain why a mother and infant couldn’t be anywhere on a large corporate campus for a few hours.

The cost of getting it wrong is real, too. Compensation in discrimination claims isn’t capped the way ordinary unfair dismissal awards are, and it includes an award for injury to feelings assessed under the Vento bands, currently from at the lower end up to for the most serious cases, with the most exceptional cases going higher still. Being humiliated, or left “in tears”, is exactly the harm those awards exist to recognise.

If this happens to you